


Atlas

by shipsgalore



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 09:51:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7356232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipsgalore/pseuds/shipsgalore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By now Clarke thinks it’s some sort of cruel joke that the world plays on her when she gets a call from somebody telling her that a person she loves is in the hospital. But when it’s Octavia calling telling her it’s Bellamy she feels her heart stop in her chest. </p><p>[Originally Posted Mar. 20, 2016]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atlas

**Author's Note:**

> this was posted a few months ago but I've made some changes and decided to delete the other one and upload the new one :)

“You’re not Atlas, Clarke, you can set the world down sometimes,” Jake Griffin mumbles into his daughters hair. He’d found her with a highlighter raised above the passages she’d copied from her Chemistry textbook but they had no markings. He had glanced at the fading bruises from her arms and had pulled her into his arms.

“The bruises are from Octavia, she started this self defense class and roped me into going with her.” She stops briefly to breathe in and settle her heart before continuing. “I’m fine, Dad, don’t worry.” And she pulled away knocking their fists together. 

She recalls that conversation now that she’s sitting in the hospital with her head pillowed on Bellamy’s shoulder and him stroking soothing circles onto the hand he’s holding. She had ran into the hospital emergency room two or so hours before, Bellamy and Octavia hot on her heels, and had stopped when she’d seen the blood and the other driver but not her dad. The tearing in her heart felt more familiar than she’d like to admit, but it seemed to be amplified ten fold because it was her best-friend, the man that she loved whole heartedly.

So now they sat -- Clarke, Bellamy, and Octavia -- waiting for the operating surgeon or her mother, because he was in _surgery_ , to tell her the news she could feel coming. Abby Griffin could not operate on Jake Griffin because he was family, but Clarke knew that it wouldn’t stop her from standing anxiously in the gallery. 

Which is how she knows the composed person coming towards her is a woman in heartache and something in Clarke snaps so terribly that she chokes on her sob and buries her face into Bellamy’s shoulder to hide the rest of her sounds. 

She is sixteen.  
.  
. 

“You don’t have to carry the world, Clarke,” Lexa had whispered into the space of her neck. 

Clarke was a sophomore at Polis University when she met Lexa Woods. They were in the same art class that Clarke wasn’t going to take until Bellamy had forced her into it, _you need something more than a punching bag and boxing gloves, Griffin_. And Lexa was a small beam at the end of the tunnel for her, something to see and get her hopes up for only to have it flicker out ever so slowly with the on going months of their relationship and Lexa’s chemotherapy. 

Clarke looks down at Lexa in her hospital bed now and thinks bitterly of the words. She reasoned that it’d made a sick sort of sense that world had thrown her Lexa; brave, headstrong, bitter, and could and would’ve fought anybody about everything. 

“I’m sorry, Clarke,” Lexa whispers now, her small hand wrapped into Clarke’s calloused one. She smiles down at her girlfriend, smiles and doesn’t accept the apology.

“Don’t apologize for something you didn’t do.” The words hurt and scrape themselves against her throat and Lexa smiles sadly, knowing that she wouldn’t be okay after she died, that Clarke was born with a broken heart, but that she loved with every broken piece of it. 

Clarke had fallen asleep in the chair next to Lexa that night and when Lexa hadn’t woken Clarke pulled herself out of the chair. She was grateful all at once that the nurse had muted the monitors that night because hearing the long drone of the flat heart rate would’ve broken her even more. 

_“Pulvis et umbra sumus.”_

Clarke is twenty-one.  
.  
.  


By now Clarke thinks it’s some sort of cruel joke that the world plays on her when she gets a call from somebody telling her that a person she loves is in the hospital. But when it’s Octavia calling telling her it’s Bellamy she feels her heart stop in her chest. 

The on call doctor tries to stop Clarke from even stepping foot onto the floor he was placed on and she nearly stops herself from yelling. “I’m his family. He is the only person I have and if you don’t let me see him I know many people that would love to have your position.” The words are seethed and whispered and after two phone calls, Clarke is in Bellamy’s room.

Octavia is sitting in the chair on his left and Clarke’s steps stutter at the sight of him in the bed. Bruises lining his face and many more injuries she knows that are hidden under the blankets and nightgown. _No._

“O, what happened?” She asks breathless, walking slowly over to the right side of the bed and taking hold of Bellamy’s other hand. _Bellamy._

“Car accident, he was T-Boned by a drunk driver on his way home from the station last night.” Clarke lets out a bitter laugh because of course it would happen on his way from the station, because they’re just _that fucking_ lucky. “Miller was his emergency contact, says that Bellamy didn’t want to worry either of us. But Miller called me after he got the call. We waited to call you until he was out of surgery. It’s not as bad as it looks,” Octavia rushes to add at the end. **“Fractured cheekbone, broken leg, sprained wrist, a concussion, and three cracked ribs.”** ; she runs the information around in her head, trying to latch onto something remotely good about any of the news. She finds nothing. 

“That’s what they tell all the families, O. He’ll survive is what they mean, but they don’t know what will happen until it happens. They can’t plan ahead his therapy or anything. They can only fix what they see happening now,” she mutters, her voice cracking on certain parts. She gets out of the chair and storms from the room. She won’t watch anybody else die. Not again. 

Clarke is twenty-five.  
.  
.

Bellamy is lying down in her bed when she gets home from rounds eight months later. He finished physical therapy last week and the bruising on his cheekbone went down two months ago, now there is a slight discoloration from before. He jolts awake when she lies down next to him, still clothed in her scrubs and smelling of disinfectant.

“How’s the world today, Atlas?” He whispers and she smiles at the ceiling. Smiles because for once the world isn’t pressing on her shoulders, Bellamy is fine, Octavia is in Europe with Lincoln, and she didn’t lose a patient. His breath rustles the escaped bits of hair from her braid that escaped from the long shift and she takes his hand in hers. 

“Quiet,” she whispers back. They aren’t together but she knows that they can both feel it edging towards there. Three years ago she wouldn’t have wanted it, too worried that she’d hurt him. She thought that she was never meant for relationships, not after Finn or Lexa, but with Bellamy the world doesn’t weigh on her like it did with them. 

When he kisses her three months later and she smiles into it, she knows that the world isn’t just resting on her shoulders anymore, that the weight has been gone for a while now. 

Clarke will be 27 when that happens.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://neiljostm.tumblr.com/)


End file.
